They’ve just published its third annual Game Changers issue. The editors singled out innovators and ideas breaking through conventions in a variety of areas, including architecture, advocacy, planning, patronage, research and history.

"A great deal of care is spent creating a diverse group of game changers," says Martin C. Pedersen, Metropolis executive editor. "This year we combined people -- the legendary historian Vincent Scully; the climate change activist and architect, Edward Mazria; the design patron, Jamie Gray -- with big bold projects like SOM's Great Lakes Century; Dream:In's research; and the Women's Opportunity Center. It's an impressive and transformative group."

The New York-based architect, working in collaboration with the non-profit group, Women for Women, is building a woman's vocational center in Rwanda that will serve as a vital community center for teaching new skills like making bricks.

In 2003 Metropolis made history when the architect Edward Mazria proclaimed buildings and their architects are key to combating climate change. Since then his organization, Architecture 2030, has lobbied tirelessly on behalf of the cause, turning our planetary crisis into a design problem for architects to do something about it.

Philip Enquist and his team of planners at SOM Chicago have created a new vision for the Great Lakes of the 21st Century. Lakeside is the first manifestation of that plan: a huge mixed use development on the site of an old U.S. Steel plant which can serve as a model for sustainable redevelopment for a region that has 20 percent of the world's fresh water.

The Dream:In initiative conducted design research at an unprecedented scale, with 101 youth researchers travelling over 15,000 miles across India, finding entrepreneurial ideas from all sections of society. With their model, Dream:In presents a new way to scale up design in the developing world.